The United States’ vast and indiscriminate worldwide surveillance of ordinary people and heads of state has no historical precedent. Now countries around the world are fighting back using the United Nations as a vehicle for change.

Inside your mobile phone and hidden behind your web browser are little known software products marketed by contractors to the government that can follow you around anywhere. No longer the wide-eyed fantasies of conspiracy theorists, these technologies are routinely installed in all of our data devices by companies that sell them to Washington for a profit.

As if the NSA spying on our every move weren’t enough, now kids have to watch what they say online in and out of school. Some 13,000 middle and high school students in Southern California will have their Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and YouTube accounts scrutinized by social media monitoring service Geo Listening.

Whether he passes reforms or not, President Obama’s mass surveillance program has made him the closest thing we have to Big Brother. Will his top lieutenants, Vice President Joe Biden and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, take that funk with them into the next election?

A 51 percent majority of British citizens support an invasive “snooping” bill according to a new poll, while 42 percent said the government should be able to break the law to conduct surveillance in the name of preventing terrorism.

New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg thinks your concerns about privacy in a world of city- and drone-mounted surveillance cameras are unimportant. His advice to radio audiences Friday morning? “Get used to it!”

New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Police Commissioner Ray Kelly on Wednesday revealed that for the last six months the city has been monitoring its residents via a network of roughly 3,000 closed circuit television cameras that feed into NYPD headquarters. The technology is termed the “Domain Awareness System.”

The Justice Department will ask Congress to make it mandatory for Internet service providers to retain data on their users’ activity. Law enforcement officials already can ask for data to be preserved, but Justice would like to have more robust snooping capabilities in order to investigate and prosecute “almost every type of crime.” (more)

The supervising bureaucrats at the Justice Department acknowledged that the FBI should not have been spying on activists, although they decided that the bureau was not targeting anti-war and environmental groups for political reasons.

Citing the specter of terrorism, an appeals court overturned a decision that would have forced New York City to turn over documents detailing the surveillance of demonstrators, street performers and other ne’er-do-wells who may have threatened the 2004 Republican convention ... and our national security, of course.

With millions of cameras watching its citizens’ every move, Britain is already one of the world’s leading surveillance states. Now the government wants to go even further, putting cameras in 20,000 private homes “to make sure children attend school, go to bed on time and eat proper meals,” reports the Telegraph. Update

Google on Wednesday officially announced its entry into the fray of contextualized advertising—serving up advertisements in accordance with a user’s prior Web-surfing habits. The move, which has raised alarm in the privacy community, carries an unprecedented privacy twist: Google users will now be able to see and edit the information the company collects about them.

While worries over Google’s “big brother” surveillance practices still worry many, a softer, more health-conscious side of the search giant is partnering with the Center for Disease Control and Prevention. The tool, “Google Flu Trends,” uses the aggregate regional data obtained from flu-related searches to predict epidemics weeks before they can be diagnosed by traditional measures.

It’s usually a reliable sign that a once-original idea has been utterly stripped of its impact by the time it becomes the premise for a reality television show. Not so for “Big Brother.” Several seasons of that particular televised train wreck have come and gone, and besides, Apple Computer also cashed in on the whole surveillance paranoia theme ages ago. Big Brother is watching. We get it.

If you thought reality TV was only for wannabe warblers, petulant teens and bug-eating fetishists, guess again. The Department of Homeland Security, “as well as several other government agencies,” according to The Hollywood Reporter, is working with ABC on a new “unscripted” show called “Border Security USA,” brought to you, creepily enough, by the executive producer of “Big Brother.”

It turns out that George Orwell, famed author of “1984” and originator of the term “Big Brother,” was spied on by his government for more than 10 years. Members of Britain’s MI5 suspected the writer of being a communist, until they bothered to read him, and were apparently baffled by his “bohemian” clothes.

If you thought reality television had already hit its nadir, guess again. The creators of the “Big Brother” franchise have whipped up a shocking new premise for their next hopeful hit in the Netherlands: A terminally ill woman will, with advice from viewers, choose the winner ... of her kidneys. Update: Producers at Endemol have admitted that the show is a hoax.

Street surveillance is taking an alarming turn for the interactive in England. As part of a government plan to target “antisocial” behavior and petty crime, closed-circuit television cameras will be installed around the country with the capacity to talk back to people engaging in unseemly acts in public places.

The Freedom of Information Act was signed into law by Lyndon Johnson in 1966, and has proved to be an indispensable tool for our democracy, but negotiating the bureaucracy can be intimidating. Luckily, the Bad Guys blog has collected a helpful assortment of FOIA resources. Check it out and find out what your government is up to.

The company’s free wireless service in San Francisco would allow Google to monitor all its users’ whereabouts—ostensibly to serve up location-specific advertising.
The feeling you just got? That would be the hairs on the back on your neck rising.